New Zodiac tips: Dad did it! No, the other guy did it!

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Just as The Chronicle started sorting through its usual thick packet of regular tips from amateur sleuths proclaiming they’ve positively, absolutely, unequivocally solved the case of the infamous Zodiac killer, a couple rose a bit above the morass.

The bottom line? Still no solution, but lots of grist for the Zodiac-following community that obsesses over every detail.

The other tipster is Chase Goodwyn, a handwriting analyst who flew to The Chronicle’s newsroom from his Chicago office to show several bulging folders of evidence that he says proves the killer was the man many investigators have been fingering all along: the late Vallejo schoolteacher Arthur Leigh Allen.

As The Chronicle’s reporters have been saying for, well, all the years since the Zodiac shot and stabbed at least five people to death in 1968 and 1969 in San Francisco and other spots of the Bay Area: All tips are considered seriously. Dismissing anything out of hand would be foolish, as the annals of crime reporting have proved again and again.

1969 police sketch of the Zodiac Killer

And when it comes to the Zodiac, there is always lots of interest. With his sinister cryptograms, braggadocio and death-driven fear, he is the most storied of all American killers whose cases have not been solved. Which is remarkable, considering the Zodiac’s victim count was nowhere near as high as many other monsters in the annals of serial killing. Take Southern California’s William “The Freeway Killer” Bonin, executed in 1996, for example — he slew dozens.

But Bonin — nor any of the others — lacked the alchemy of creepiness, fear and mystery that the Zodiac had. And has.

As he killed, the Zodiac sent cryptograms and taunting letters to The Chronicle and other newspapers and had the Bay Area in a frenzy of fear. Dozens of killings have been attributed to him since his last officially confirmed murder — cab driver Paul Stine in San Francisco, 1969 — but authorities carefully stick to the victim total of five. So does The Chronicle — though, of course, without conclusive findings, anything is possible.

The San Francisco Police Department takes the same attitude. And while neither of the latest two tips — nor the hundreds of others that spill in to The Chronicle and local authorities every year — have led to an arrest, that doesn’t mean they won’t eventually, said police Officer Albie Esparza, who’s been taking quite a few calls this week regarding Stewart’s book. New contentions about the Zodiac, especially those slung forth by a major publisher, tend to generate a large — OK, huge — number of calls.

“This is America, so people are entitled to their opinions,” Esparza said, in the careful phrasing that cops so often use when discussing Zodiac tips. “Anyone who has information on the Zodiac case is encouraged to contact our investigators, and we are of course going to look into it just as we do all such information.”

Read: No arrest imminent. But you never know.

Stewart’s book has a few slices of local connection that make it more interesting than most, however. One is that Stewart — a 51-year-old vice president of a cleaning company — says his father married his mother in 1962 in San Francisco and promptly triggered salacious headlines in newspapers including The Chronicle.

Chronicle clippings about the ‘Ice Cream Romance’ involving Earl Van Best, fingered as the Zodiac Killer by his son.

The trouble, he writes, is that Earl Van Best was 28 and his bride, Judy Chandler, was 14. Best did jail time for robbing the near-cradle, the marriage was annulled, and The Chronicle’s stories railed about the “Ice Cream Romance” (the couple met at an ice cream parlor) and the pair’s “reckless love.”

Earl Van Best and his bride Judy Chandler / Chronicle library

One of the writers was, Stewart says, The Chronicle’s own Paul Avery — the same Paul Avery who later covered the Zodiac killings and got a personal letter from the murderer. The clippings, however, are unbylined, so it’s hard to tell who wrote what.

Stewart was given up by his parents, he writes, and wound up being adopted by a loving couple in Baton Rouge. But as an adult he became curious about his birth parents, and his research led him to the San Francisco Police Department where, he says, investigators including now-retired Police Chief Earl Sanders helped him dig up records on his father. After a certain point, though, the cops clammed up, he writes, saying whatever what in the file was offensive.

Stewart went on to conclude that the Zodiac’s handwriting and pictures resembled his father’s. He also writes that the Zodiac’s cyphers spell out Van Best’s name, and offers up many other circumstantial connections to make his case. Van Best died decades ago, according to the book, so he’s not around to rebut.

Check it out for yourself to see if Van Best resembles the Zodiac sketch:

Most of the sizable collection of amateur Zodiac sleuths out there on the web aren’t buying Stewart’s theory.

Tom Voigt, who runs Zodiackiller.com, is sticking to his contention that the bad guy was former newspaperman Richard Gaikowski of San Francisco, who died in 2004. The competing zodiackillersite.com says Stewart “provides no proof, no evidence.”

Stewart is unswayed by the skepticism.

“Sometimes the truth is so horrible that it must be uncovered in bits and pieces, snippets here and there, absorbed slowly, as the whole of it at once is simply too shocking to bear,” Stewart writes.

Handwriting, picture similarities and cypher clues are the bedrock of hundreds of other contentions — and that’s where the Chicago tip comes in.

Goodwyn says his careful examination of the Zodiac’s sinister letters and Leigh Allen’s handwriting make the similarities inescapable, despite earlier findings by others that make the opposite point. Allen is the man who was found to have a Zodiac watch, a Royal typewriter whose letters resembled those on the Zodiac Killer’s letters, and who lived not far from the scene of one of the killings.

Some of handwriting analyst Chase Goodwyn’s research / Chronicle photo by Kevin Fagan

He’s also the man named as the most likely suspect by Robert Graysmith, the former Chronicle employee who wrote the definitive books on the mystery — the books which were used in the 2007 movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith.

“The letter characteristics that match are very unique, and not something you can fake,” said Goodwyn, who let The Chronicle photograph some of his research — but not him. “Arthur Leigh Allen is the Zodiac.”

Just for perspective, here are a few other solutions proffered up in recent years:

Those claiming the Zodiac was their father include Orange County real estate agent Deborah Perez, Los Angeles cop Steve Hodel and Dennis Kaufman of Northern California, who produced a Zodiac-style hood and grainy film as evidence. Others say the Zodiac was a prominent San Francisco businessman who recently died, or was actually a band of rogue cops, or doubled as the Unabomber.

And in 2011 a band of retired law enforcement officials who had investigated the original Zodiac case, led by Lyndon Lafferty of Vallejo, maintained the killer was a 92-year-old real estate salesman in Fairfield. The salesman died the next year.

The most telling evidence of all so far, however: Nobody’s been tossed behind bars, let alone convicted. No conclusive finding has been determined by the people who count the most at this point — the cops. And until that happens, Officer Esparza said: “The case is still open.”